“I was planning on just skipping ninth grade,” says the renowned astrophysicist, who spent her summers taking calculus classes at Carnegie Mellon University. “But when the school year was about to start, the teachers went on strike and my math professor said, ‘Why don't you just start here?’”

Three years later, Charlton received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics. She headed for the University of Chicago, where she earned her master’s at 19, and her Ph.D. at 22. By the time Charlton had her first child, in her late 20s, she was a tenured professor at Pennsylvania State University, where she maps the universe and charts the history of evolving galaxies.

“By skipping grades and getting to grad school early, I could devote time and energy to building my career and earn tenure before I started raising a family,” says Charlton. “It was extremely beneficial to my career not to be devoting my 20s to anything else.”

Charlton is an outlier, not only in terms of her intelligence and ambition, but also because educators allowed her to accelerate ahead of her peers and satisfy her hunger and capacity to learn. Many of the estimated 1.5 million to 2.5 million mathematically gifted girls—6 to 10 percent of girls in U.S. K-12 classrooms, according to the National Association for Gifted Children—don’t have the option to accelerate. They move through schools and universities at a pace that all but ensures that their prime career-building years will, for those who want to have children, overlap with family-making years, forcing many to make career-stunting trade-offs.

Understanding the opportunity and achievement gaps in U.S. universitiesRead more

Creating more opportunities for super-bright girls to skip grades might be one of the most viable ways to open cracks in the glass ceiling that has plagued STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields for decades. But these days, young children are far more likely to be “redshirted”—held back from school to allow extra time for physical, socioemotional, or intellectual growth—than they are to charge ahead of their same-age peers.

Grade-skipping and early college admissions were relatively common in the U.S. during the Cold War, when the nation’s brightest students were considered a strategic resource and nurturing their talents became a national priority. Educators encouraged acceleration, and school districts invested in enrichment programs for the most capable and eager students.

These post-Sputnik brainiacs rose quickly through schools, universities, and graduate programs, spurring an unprecedented increase in doctorates and highly educated adults whose innovations boosted living standards, created tens of millions of jobs, and fueled much of the West’s economic growth.

It was a hallmark of the times that most of those high-paying science and engineering jobs were filled by men. The times have changed, but the imbalance in science and technical fields persists: Though women now make up more than half of the U.S. workforce and earn the majority of masters and doctorate degrees, they comprise just 24 percent of STEM workers.

That imbalance can’t be explained by lack of early interest: Nearly three-quarters of high-school girls in the U.S. are interested in the fields and subjects of STEM, according to a study by the Girl Scout Research Institute. But other research indicates that pervasive stereotyping and gender discrimination—by teachers, parents, and fellow students—exposes girls to the message that females are inferior in the STEM fields. Despite a raft of initiatives to support and encourage girls to pursue these fields, engagement with math and science tends to wane as girls get older.

Among women who do make it into the STEM workforce, the ranks tend to dwindle with each higher rung on the career ladder. At the very top, women hold only 5 percent of leadership positions.

What is holding high-ability women back when they go into their peak career-building years? At least one study suggests that the gender gap in STEM professions the can be attributed at least partly to different priorities and life and work choices that men and women make.

The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) has for 46 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 people whose high cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years. The SMPY data have generated more than 400 papers, including one that looked at how the career paths of precociously gifted males and females diverged over the past four decades. While they started their academic lives similarly, priorities began to deviate once they rose to the professional level. Men reported working an average of 11 more hours per week than the women. Asked how much they’d be willing to work if they had their “ideal job,” 30 percent of women were unwilling to work more than 40 hours per week; only seven percent of men felt the same way.

“You can call it a choice, but … who else is going have the babies?”

In an attempt to understand this apparent divide in priorities and time allocation, the SMPY researchers analyzed the values reported by each gender group. Among the men’s top values were full-time work, making an impact, and earning a high income. Women were more inclined to value part-time work, time for close relationships, and community and family involvement.

“There are many exceptions, but as a whole mathematically gifted men are working more and achieving more professionally, while women value more balanced lives,” says the paper’s co-author Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. STEM professionals are particularly susceptible to “knowledge decay,” Benbow adds. “If you step out for a year or two to raise kids or care for an elderly parent [two duties that most often fall to women], you don’t step back into the same stream; you often get passed by.”

And yet, despite their overall lower professional commitment and achievement, female study subjects generally considered themselves as successful and as satisfied as their male counterparts. “The women expressed stronger preferences for and devoted more time to advancing family and community,” says Benbow. “Both groups are contributing to society, though they travel different paths to highly productive and satisfying lives.”

But to women who have experienced systemic or personal discrimination in offices, laboratories, or homes, attributing the STEM gender gap to different lifestyle preferences and priorities may seem too convenient.

“I think it’s bullshit,” says the neurosurgeon Deborah Benzil, who, like Charlton, participated in the SMPY survey. “You can call it a choice, but it’s a choice that men don’t usually have to make. Who else is going have the babies?”

In the U.S., only 5 percent of neurosurgeons are women. Benzil belongs to a professional group of female neurosurgeons that recently conducted an informal survey of its members. “Virtually every woman considers having kids as a hurdle,” says Benzil. “Some wanted to have children, but they didn’t think the profession would allow it.”

Benzil, who didn’t have an option to skip grades in primary or secondary school, had her first child while she was a medical resident, against the strong objections of her program director. “I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone,” she says. “Even with a super-supportive partner, it was extremely challenging. I was physically wrecked during those early years.”

It may be that high-ability women have come to define success more broadly than men because they have less opportunity in the workplace. A study of 25,000 Harvard Business School alumni found that a majority of both men and women wanted their careers to be at least as important as their spouse’s. When children came along, though, the men’s careers increasingly took precedence and the women’s careers usually suffered.

Accelerating the conventional education timeline—which all but ensures that a woman’s peak career-building years will overlap with peak childbearing and child-rearing years—may give more high-ability women who want to have children the opportunity to reach high levels in STEM than currently is the case.

SMPY and numerous other studies have provided large-sample evidence that appropriate acceleration benefits the vast majority of gifted children. In a comparison of grade-skipping students with a control group of equally smart students who stayed with their age groups, the grade-skippers were more than twice as likely to earn a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering, and had more patents and publications at mid-career. Even modest interventions, such as access to Advanced Placement courses or self-paced instruction, give students demonstrable advantages that continue through college and into the workplace. Conversely, exceptionally gifted students who remain with their age peers typically underachieve and experience negative effects on motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety.

“Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try new things.”

Still, many teachers and parents remain skeptical of acceleration, believing that it will push children out of childhood or hurt them socially. One survey of teachers found pervasive and entrenched beliefs that acceleration jeopardizes social-emotional adaptation, despite the weight of evidence that acceleration produces social-emotional gains for the majority of gifted and talented students.

Charlton, the astrophysicist, says that the jump to college made her teenage years less stressful. “Socially I couldn’t have made out well in high school,” she says. “People my own age viewed me as peculiar. At 15, college was a better place for me. I was with my intellectual peers and I made good friends. And being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try new things.”

Proponents of acceleration caution that it can have adverse effects on students who are not emotionally and socially mature.

“Just because the research says it works for average kid doesn’t mean it’s a viable solution for every girl who could work above grade level,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental psychologist who co-founded the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College, which is part of the City University of New York. “If a really young girl is thrown in with more mature kids, she can grow up too soon—emotionally, socially, and sexually.”

Matthews herself was accelerated as a child. “It was very good for me. But I've seen negative experiences with kids I've worked with, and with my daughter. It seemed like a no-brainer for her, and at first she acclimated just fine. But when she reached the seventh grade, it wasn’t healthy for her to be in that older cohort.”

Acceleration works best, Matthews says, when groups of girls can accelerate together, and when support for the students’ social and emotional needs is in place. Other talent-development experts advise that acceleration needs to be more than a placement decision; it should be an ongoing process of careful planning and implementation.

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In a perfect world, schools would give every child an education that matches his or her current level of achievement. But since the turn of the millennium, resources for gifted programs have been diverted to support a long-overdue focus on the nation’s underachievers; consequently, many schools have become far less appropriate for students at the top end of the talent curve. That may be changing as some schools and school districts implement “personalized-learning” programs that tailor curricula, instruction, and pace to individual students’ strengths and interests. But in the majority of schools, high-ability students and their parents often need to advocate for interventions that will allow them to progress at speeds that fit their natural or preferred rate of learning.

Accelerating these students often costs little or nothing—and in some cases may actually save schools money. “These kids often don’t need anything innovative or novel,” says the psychologist David Lubinski, who co-directs the SMPY survey. “Often they just need access to what's already available to older kids, but sooner.”

When I ask Charlton what she imagines high school would have been like for her had she not skipped past it, she responds quickly.

“I would have spent most of my time waiting,” she says.

Indeed, “waiting” was the most common response when Tracy Cross at the College of William and Mary asked 13,000 children in seven states to describe in one word their experience as gifted children. “They said they were always waiting for teachers to move ahead, waiting for classmates to catch up, waiting to learn something new—always waiting,” Cross says.

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This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”